A blog for The Urutsk Cycle and Related Subjects,
including the URUTSK: World of Mystery RPG.
Shipwrecked survivors of a galaxy-spanning empire (ruined when the core exploded) settle upon a wetlands world occupied by humans and other species. They then poke through ruins of their Ancient ancestors as they strive to regain space and then, starflight.

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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

We played using the UWOM setting. The GM, Stephen Laidlaw used the terrain/hex/encounter tables from the Beta Referee's manual. Each of the four players was given a mostly-blank sheet of paper with few words about the character on it - mine said:

Yande; Male; shirt, boots, breeches, embroided waistcoat, belt.

The game started with the PCs waking up groggy and retching, a foul taste in their mouths, to find themselves in a longhut on stilts in a swamp. Humans (?) - two male, two females, we seemed to know very little. We (the players) asked lots of questions about how we looked, how we felt, what we saw in the hut etc to piece together the situation. Yande seemed like a well-groomed gaunt young man -a fair-haired Vrun ? Teash seemed to be a shaven-headed Yir[inn] male, Mouwles was a tough-looking brunette, Niame was a lithe WI Vrun female. We all seemed to have lost any memory of who we were and how we had come to be in the hut. There was a shelf of odd bits of field gear/rations/water in the hut but no weapons or armour. It looked like there had been another inhabitant there recently.

During the session the characters left the stilt-hut to explore the surrounded environs - swamp wetlands. Mouwles found footprints on a stretch of solid land which led to a newly-ravaged body in a clearing. Teash seemed to recognise the carrion-insects feasting on the corpse. The man had been armed with a folding light crossbow and a machete. The killing blows had come from large clawed creatures, Teash reckoned they were probably feline. The weapons were shared out between Mouwles and Yande, Niame took the leather vest that looked huge on her.

Then the flashbacks and nausea started. Stephen handed out notes to each player at several points in the session. Yande remembers operatic arias and a masked swordswoman kicking him into a canal. After evading a monstrous horned reptile ridden by humanoids with slingshots and fighting off three spiny pack-cats (Yande seems very deadly and precise in combat, Niame's fast) the PCs reached a lakeside fortified outpost and distillery. They learn they are in the Vrun Berror region and decide to head to the capitol on a merchant's riverboat, their passage paid with the pack-cat pelts.

More flashbacks - an audience with an elderly woman producing feelings of dread, a technical sketch, a purple glow, screams dying to whispers.

The session had to end there.

Stephen obviously has us all statted up, I've not guessed the system yet, and we're only realising what our characters can do well/badly through doing stuff. We're definitely not 1st level !

A mix of sandbox with a backstory that reveals itself as a result of regular dice rolls. It's almost as if we're playing what happens after a (failed?) scenario. Cool idea, good session, looking forward to the next.